With the continuous progress of science and technology, the bandwidth of the Internet increases gradually, and more and more people view massive online pictures via a terminal device such as a mobile phone, a tablet computer, etc. Since the data amount of a picture is usually much larger than that of a plain text, when viewing massive pictures, a lot of traffic will also be consumed, and at the same time, the transmission time will also be long. While the consumption of traffic may be decreased by reducing the quality of a picture, this will have a certain impact on the experience of a user. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a method for finding a balance between the “picture quality” and the “transmission speed” without affecting the experience of a user.
The technical solution of a first prior art is that after getting a URL (Uniform/Universal Resource Locator) of an original picture, a client directly makes a request to a server, and the picture will not be transmitted until the request is successful.
The first prior art provides a simple and intuitive transmission method. However, its drawback is also obvious. If the size of an original picture is large, the amount of data to be transmitted is also large, but the first prior art simply sends the picture intactly to a client and the consumed traffic also becomes obviously large, and yet on some terminal devices with a small screen, such an original picture of high quality does not have an obvious improvement on the experience.
With respect to the drawback of the first prior art, a second prior art adds a picture bed server module. A client will select one from two or three kinds of different picture quality according to the current network condition, and then make a transmission request to the picture bed server. In response to the request, the picture bed server will transmit the picture data to the client and eventually present it to a user. Due to differentiation of the network condition, the final picture quality will be divided into two to three kinds: 2G network, 3G network, and Wi-Fi network. The 2G and 3G networks are provided by a mobile operator and will produce traffic fees in most cases, and therefore the traffic consumption and speed need to be considered. And yet the Wi-Fi network is provided by a nearby wireless router, there will not be traffic fees in most cases for it, and its speed is much faster than the former two, and therefore the traffic consumption and speed do not need to be considered. Thus, in the second prior art, a picture in a 2G/3G network will be processed into a picture of low quality for transmission, whereas the Wi-Fi network transmits a picture of high quality.
The second prior art realizes a method for selecting the quality of a picture that should be transmitted according to the network condition. In some scenarios (e.g., a 2G, 3G network, etc.) attaching great importance to traffic consumption, such a method plays the role of reducing traffic consumption and increasing the transmission speed. And yet the reduced picture quality is also acceptable on some devices.
However, due to the diversity of terminal devices, many different display sizes and display resolutions arise. For different resolutions, the display effects will also differ greatly, and the prior art cannot take into account these comprehensively. As an example, if a user is currently in a 2G network environment, the prior art will download a picture of low quality to reduce the traffic consumption and accelerate the transmission speed. If this picture is placed on a terminal device with the resolution of 320×240 and the size of 3.2 inches, the display effect will be good. However, if the same picture is placed on a terminal device with the resolution of 1280×800 and the size of 4.8 inches, since the terminal device is to ensure that a user can see a display pattern on a large-screen terminal device similar to that on a small-screen terminal device, in order to realize such an effect, the picture will be stretched, and the problems of blurring, excessive glitches, etc. that seriously affect the display effect will arise.
It is thus clear that although for the second prior art which determines the picture quality through the network environment, the problem with the transmission speed is solved to some extent, with respect to the display effect of a picture (the picture quality), there is a great difference between different terminal devices, and especially for a large-screen terminal device, the display effect thereby also becomes poor.